The Government Won’t Let Me Watch Them Kill Bison, so I’m Suing (2015) | Hacker News Reader

The Government Won’t Let Me Watch Them Kill Bison, so I’m Suing (2015)

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45 pointsggauravr18 comments

> I think that if the public knew what was being done to the Yellowstone herd, people might demand a change in policy.

I feel the same way about all animals unnecessarily slaughtered. "If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian." [1] I would take it further and say that if dairy farms had (metaphorical) glass walls [2], everyone would be vegan.

It's tragic what is happening to the Bison, but it's not significantly different than what happened to most people's meals.

[1] https://youtu.be/HjqOTtJYXX0

[2] https://youtu.be/iL9QJEm_SJY

I think this statement could only have come from someone who haven't spent much time outside of big cities. At least where I am from, people in more rural settings don't care about bovine or porcine feelings. This certainly doesn't mean that we torture animals, but when their time comes, the knife goes in, and meat goes on the table. "Everyone" most certainly would not become vegetarian.

Countryside dwellers dont know any more about the particulars of slaughter. I find that even farmers tend to be surprisingly ignorant outside of their narrow slice of expertise. Remember, argiculture is a highly specialized and thus compartmentalized industry, so there is usually no need to know anything about other links in de chain.

> I find that even farmers tend to be surprisingly ignorant outside of their narrow slice of expertise.

In recent years I came to the conclusion that this statement is true for the majority of us.

I think many people, 'countrysiders' and farmers included, mistakenly attribute some sort of natural mysticism, simplicity to farming. There is absolutely nothing 'natural' or simple about industrial (western) farming. From mining minerals, producing fertilizers, landscape management, crop engineering, cropfeed engineering, butching techniques, disease control and then foodtech which has it's own universe of methods and companies.

It takes an interested mind to put all that in perspective. Whether or not you do that has nothing to do with where you live or what you do (well, maybe some agritech types have this in their job description).

Plenty of interested minds put that together and don’t come to the same conclusion as you, my friend.

First world problems. I have watched chickens getting slaughtered and dressed at a local butcher and that didn't prevent me from cooking them, nor enjoying the cooked dish.

I don't mind killing animals for food. Seen deer clean etc. I think the message is still relevant to you because how you or I would raise then kill and butcher an animal isn't at all how the meat in a super market or restaurant in the USA gets there.

If you think "I'm not in the US what do I care." I would argue the one thing the US is still the best at is spreading our business culture and practices around the world. If our practices aren't in your part of the world I expect they will be before long < 20 years.

I enjoy flyfishing and eat my catch. I kill the fish, gut and scale it myself none of that prevents me from enjoying my fillets of trout, steelhead, and salmon. I don't currently have enough land to do so but plan on raising some poultry for meat and eggs. Animal slaughter for food is not that bad.

"You have to kill or pay someone to kill for you."

No idea who said it originally, but a unique English Lit teacher was fond of repeating it. No idea if it was his own thought.

The lawsuit did apparently result in some access, no particularly good camera angles though: https://truthout.org/articles/montana-s-beef-with-buffalo-an...

The fight now seems to be focused on getting the bison classified as an endangered species: https://www.nationalparkstraveler.org/2019/09/fish-and-wildl...

I couldn't get past the first few paragraphs. Culling of wild animals by definition has to do with carrying capacity and I would have expected that to be the basic point of discussion.

OK, why ban public access?

Maybe because they think it's easy to whip up public frenzy even over something completely justified?

Though as the uncle comment notes, it doesn't really seem "completely justified" here.

This paragraph, later on in the piece, briefly addresses the issue. According to the sources the author cites, the cull is not ecologically justified, but rather to stop the cattle from competing with domestic cattle.

>> Of the estimated 5,000 bison in the park in February, only a few hundred had roamed into Montana, and most of these had already been killed. The goal during 2015 was to "cull," in the language of wildlife management, at least 900 of the creatures, almost 20 percent of the herd. Park Service officials told me that the IBMP had established a maximum population of 3,000 bison in the park, and that this year's cull was a first step toward achieving that number. James Bailey, a retired professor of wildlife biology at Colorado State University and author of the 2013 book American Plains Bison: Rewilding an Icon, told me the ceiling of 3,000 animals is "a political number, not a biological or ecological number. It's what the ranchers will accept.

FYI: article dated May 21 2015

This makes me so sad. I visited Yellowstone in 2013. The buffalo are magnificent, beautiful creatures. One of them almost killed me, and I don't blame it one bit. I was driving on its road.

I really wish they could figure out a way to let them roam off of the park lands.

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